Thursday, April 10, 2014

Bits and Pieces - April 10, 2014

Seymour Hersh has stenographed an article from a dubious source. There are so many things wrong with it, it took several people to show them all up. I've collected some of the best and added a few of my own comments here.

Something I point out toward the end of that post is commonalities among various incidents that point to Russian propaganda operations. They are indeed thick these days, with regard to Ukraine, but Syria is one of Russia's interests too. This intensity of propaganda hasn't been reached since Soviet times, and social media are a new outlet. There's a philosophical side to propaganda: actually more than one side. The first is epistemological: how do we know what we know? The other is the role of propaganda in building reality. On the first, I am tempted to say that too much of that kind of thing makes people crazy. We can consider the Republican Party and its various fantasies. And now the Russian Duma is looking at criminalizing the fall of the Soviet Union. I hope to write more about this. Just seems like a lot of crazy around today.